BoxCar

Over pricing is a politically correct way of stating price gouging. While demand and supply are factors in setting prices for merchandise inflating the selling price on items in stock by significant amounts due to availability fits into the realm of price gouging better than over pricing such as adding a premium to the established purchase prices.

You know Michael, I have never seen a desktop microphone from any manufacturer that included the buttons found on a mobilemicrophone. Have you in your vast experience seen one? Perhaps you could provide us with a link to one?

Wouxun may not have one but if you know the connector pin assignments you can adapt almost any unit to the radio.

Yes Dan, that's exactly what I'm saying. A repeater owner has no responsibility for traffic across the repeater unless they specifically generate the input traffic. Access codes do not imply control as there is no operator at the station's controls. If repeater owners were held liable for illegal or improper traffic there wouldn't be any repeaters because of liability issues.

A commercial product, Comstudy, has been doing this for more than 20 years. At one popint, all the Part 90.20 coordinators used the software until they invested the resources to develop their own products.

This is untrue. A repeater owner is not responsible for any traffic carried through the repeater as the repeater has no control over the traffc. The responsibility lies solely with the traffic originator. The repeater owner would be responsible only if they originated the improper transmission in the first place.

Yes. Any changes to the terrain around you will affect recepton. You could have reflections from buildings or signal absorbtion when in the city. Trees will absorb signals in the country.

A CSV file is a textual liist of the repeaters selected. Each repeater is a single line in the file with the different elements separated by a comma. CSV means comma separated variables

Still another option is talk to a local ham club and tell them you'll buy the equipment if they they install it at one of theri sites.

First off, it is doubtful people will show up at your house because you install a repeater. Under Part 95 repeaters don't have to be coordinated by an assigned FCC coordinator and listed. Your repeater operates under your call sign on GMRS. The only way you might get people showing up is if you have HOA restrictions and you violate them. Secondly, your repeater will only be available to people operating on GMRS frequencies, not FRS or Bubble Pack radios that do not require licensing. Bubble Pack Family Radio service radios are what you would find in most people's "go pack" as they are what's found at your local Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Before spending that cash I would also do a little research and see how many potential users that could currently use your repeater. Do a search on the FCC website to see how many people are currently licensed for GMRS in your county. Expect that number to slowly grow once you install the system. People will still need to purchase GMRS radios and hopefully get licensed for them as well. Again, you aren't going to find GMRS radios in the local big box stores. Thirdly, and most importantly, you need to think about your coverage area. Talk out isn't as important as talk in or receiving signals form low power hand held radios. For that, you will need height on your antenna which means a tower or pole mounted antenna. Finally, your repeater is a LOCAL resource, it won't be of much use in an evacuation as there would be no one local to use it. It may be of use to those evacuating through your coverage area but it won't help you or your family if you leave the area. In all actuality, I personally believe you would be better served by having you and your family get amateur Technician licenses and use the money to install both a 2 meter base and mobile system for your house and vehicle. Tech licenses are not difficult to get and the infrastructure for 2 meter VHF and 70 cm UHF repeaters is quite robust across the country. For amateur help go to the ARRL website and look up what amateur clubs are in your area. Many clubs have websites where you can look up the number of repeaters in your area. You can also use sites like Repeater Book to do an area search for repeaters. Amateur clubs will hold classes free of charge to teachthe required rules needed to be licensed and there are several free websites that offer practice tests to help you pass an exam. All this advice is worth exactly what you paid for it as it's just my opinion. Bill WRCM737, K4BJW

Great report, full of factual information based on actual observations confirming your research. This spring/summer consider putting the two batteries in parallel for added capacity even if the LiFe one has to be removed before winter to prevent freezing.

2 things about the ISS. First it has to be overhead, usually about a 15 minute window, and second uplink and down link are in two bands. One VHF and the other UHF.

If you are serious about getting your Technician license, I will suggest the Yaesu FT-4XR. You can program this radio with PC software and by entering a software code, enable it to work on the GMRS channels. The radio is not FCC approved for GMRS use, but it functions on those frequencies. I have an unlocked one in my posession. FT-4XR YAESU FT4XR DUAL BAND COMPACT HT (rlham.com)

It's also useful for temporary cross-band repeaters

The published bandwidth for the 1486 is 10 MHz. The Tram 1485 has 5dBd gain with a 20 MHz bandwidth and is pretuned to 460 MHz.

Another test would be to program the second radio to receive on the uplink frequency and transmit on the downlink, if you can't trigger the repeater.

Welcome. There are many here that can offer advice and assistance.

Welcome to the group

More power usually means better coverage in the areas you can already reach. From my experience the amount of area you can cover is increased by less than 5%. Antenna selection and placement usually mean much more than increasing the ERP. There are really 3 power measurements needed to get a true picture of your potential coverage. You need to measure the RF output into a dummy load first then through the antenna feed line and finally, using a field strength meter the actual signal from the antenna. The measurement of the feed line is because line losses published are averages based on samples produced. Your actual loss will probably be higher than the published figures because of adding the connectors.

24 AWG would be sufficient

Yes, you can use an amp but why? It would be less expensive to just buy a higher power radio without the multiple point-of-failure hassle.

Welcome

First off, that's too many radios for one operator especially without computer control. You would be well served by talking to NENA, the National Emergency Number Association about picking up and configuring a used 9-1-1 console.

The Bridgecom equipment is solid. Gigaparts listed an open box unit for $1400 they will tune for the purchaser.

The Wouxun uses the two pin T connector power cord.